Là-bas eBook

“As he can descend no further, he tries returning
on the way by which he has come, but now remorse overtakes
him, overwhelms him, and wrenches him without respite.
His nights are nights of expiation. Besieged by
phantoms, he howls like a wounded beast. He is
found rushing along the solitary corridors of the
chateau. He weeps, throws himself on his knees,
swears to God that he will do penance. He promises
to found pious institutions. He does establish,
at Machecoul, a boys’ academy in honour of the
Holy Innocents. He speaks of shutting himself
up in a cloister, of going to Jerusalem, begging his
bread on the way.

“But in this fickle and aberrated mind ideas
superpose themselves on each other, then pass away,
and those which disappear leave their shadow on those
which follow. Abruptly, even while weeping with
distress, he precipitates himself into new debauches
and, raving with delirium, hurls himself upon the
child brought to him, gouges out the eyes, runs his
finger around the bloody, milky socket, then he seizes
a spiked club and crushes the skull. And while
the gurgling blood runs over him, he stands, smeared
with spattered brains, and grinds his teeth and laughs.
Like a hunted beast he flees into the wood, while his
henchmen remove the crimson stains from the ground
and dispose prudently of the corpse and the reeking
garments.

“He wanders in the forests surrounding Tiffauges,
dark, impenetrable forests like those which Brittany
still can show at Carnoet. He sobs as he walks
along. He attempts to thrust aside the phantoms
which accost him. Then he looks about him and
beholds obscenity in the shapes of the aged trees.
It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that
his very presence depraves it. For the first
time he understands the motionless lubricity of trees.
He discovers priapi in the branches.

“Here a tree appears to him as a living being,
standing on its root-tressed head, its limbs waving
in the air and spread wide apart, subdivided and re-subdivided
into haunches, which again are divided and re-subdivided.
Here between two limbs another branch is jammed, in
a stationary fornication which is reproduced in diminished
scale from bough to twig to the top of the tree.
There it seems the trunk is a phallus which mounts
and disappears into a skirt of leaves or which, on
the contrary, issues from a green clout and plunges
into the glossy belly of the earth.

“Frightful images rise before him. He sees
the skin of little boys, the lucid white skin, vellum-like,
in the pale, smooth bark of the slender beeches.
He recognizes the pachydermatous skin of the beggar
boys in the dark and wrinkled envelope of the old
oaks. Beside the bifurcations of the branches
there are yawning holes, puckered orifices in the bark,
simulating emunctoria, or the protruding anus of a
beast. In the joints of the branches there are
other visions, elbows, armpits furred with grey lichens.
Even in the trunks there are incisions which spread
out into great lips beneath tufts of brown, velvety
moss.